Friday, April 24, 2015

The Eerie 'Pea Soup" Color Before The Storm...

Eerie magical lighting. Sometimes it is just before a storm, sometimes near dusk or dawn. There are times the light just seems odd, dreamlike or really unusual. It seems hard to catch on film, but even florescent lighting has an element of it. Something unnatural.

Our world of color is much more complex than RGB values. In our industry, we are accustomed to expressing every color by some triad of numbers; RGB being the most common. However, actual color is a spectrum, not a color point. What we perceive is typically the peak of the spectrum, red, green, purple, whatever. Turns out however that RGB is not a unique spectrum. That is there are many, many different spectrums that can take us to any given RGB value. It is this difference between the spectrum and the RGB color point that make magic.

Let’s look at what we humans evolved with, sunlight. The color spectrum of sunlight is pretty flat. That is, all the colors are well represented from the sun. Plants have a sort of color vision, in that they absorb light mostly in two narrow colors (around 400 & 600 nm). This sunlight is what we are used to.

Photographers are aware that typical florescent lighting is not just a color, it is also missing some colors. This is why, no matter what post color you add to offset florescent, it never looks quite right. All artificial light spectrums look off.

So below is a spectrum graph I made, showing that magical and unpleasant light is not about the color, but about unusual valleys and peaks in color. It might be the same color as a smooth curve, but those spectral holes create the magical nature of light.

[Geeky sidebar. I decided to illustrate this post with an ITRI certified spectrometer. The unit I am using, the MK350 records spectra onto memory cards so I can share the spectrums with you. I use this device for analyzing light prior to filming and then for precise color control all the way through to exhibition.]

Followers

Barry B. Sandrew, Ph.D.

Founder - Graffiti Video, Inc.

BIOGRAPHY

This is a series of blogs by Barry Sandrew, Ph.D., an internationally recognized inventor, digital imaging expert and visual effects pioneer. Dr. Sandrew is founder of three visual effects facilities that were among the largest and most prolific production studios in Hollywood. Over the past three decades he has been and continues to be instrumental in evolving the entertainment Industry's digital standards and processes in feature filmmaking.

Sandrew earned his doctorate in neuroscience from SUNY at Stony Brook. After winning a 2 year NIH Fellowship at Columbia University, College of Physicians & Surgeons, he joined Harvard Medical School/MGH as staff Neuroscientist. In 1987, Sandrew left his academic and scientific career to found American Film Technologies (AFT) where he invented the first all digital process for colorizing black and white feature films.

At AFT he also invented a paperless animation process used to produce episodic animation for Fox Children's TV and a digital ink & paint and compositing pipeline that produced Spielberg's first digital animated feature film, "We're Back: A Dinosaur Story." Sandrew took AFT public while converting hundreds of movies for clients such as Turner, Disney, Warner Bros., Fox, Gaumont, TF1, ABC, and CBS, among many others.

In 1993 Barry Sandrew left American Film Technologies to co-found Lightspan, an animation and production edutainment studio that grew into one of the largest educational software companies in the U.S., marketing into entire school districts around the country. Lightspan ultimately went public and was later acquired by Plato Learning.

In 2000, Sandrew founded Legend Films, re-inventing colorization and a proprietary film restoration process using the latest in digital imaging technology. Over the course of the next 7 years, Legend Films converted to color approximately 145 black & white films as well as several TV series. Legend Films also produced visual effects for Scorsese's "The Aviator", HBO's "Entourage" and other high profile TV and film projects.

In 2007, with Jim Cameron's game changing "Avatar 3D" scheduled for a 2009 release, Sandrew leveraged his proprietary colorization pipeline, redirecting his company's entire R&D focus to embrace 2D-to-3D conversion and changing the company's name to Legend3D. Since 2010, Legend3D has lead the competitive field, producing 3D conversion and visual effects on over 35 of the highest performing box office tentpole films of the past 6 years.

In 2014, Dr. Barry Sandrew left Legend3D to focus on new immersive and web based media technologies as well his non-profit and for-profit board positions. He is consultant to Fortune 500 companies re: mobile 3D-sensing and motion tracking technology that he considers precursors to augmented reality. Most recently, he is Co-Founder and President/CEO of Graffiti Video, Inc. a company that is redefining the curation of web based media.